


On Exposure

by gen_is_gone



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (TV Movie 1996), Doctor Who: Eighth Doctor Adventures - Various Authors
Genre: Day At The Beach, Feelings Realization, Fluff and Angst, Found Family, Gen, Kinda, Nonbinary Doctor (Doctor Who), Platonic Relationships, loving people makes you vulnerable
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-18 16:10:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21930199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gen_is_gone/pseuds/gen_is_gone
Summary: On one of the rare days that the Doctor actually arrives at their intended destination, they decide to indulge in a beach picnic.
Relationships: Anji Kapoor & Fitz Kreiner, anji kapoor & Eighth Doctor
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17
Collections: Classic Who Secret Santa 2019





	On Exposure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [clockworkouroboros](https://archiveofourown.org/users/clockworkouroboros/gifts).



> Happy Holidays to everyone who celebrates this time of year, and I hope everyone, but Clockworkouroboros in particular, enjoys this!

On one of the rare days that the Doctor actually arrives at their intended destination, they decide to indulge in a beach picnic. Anji is sure to check the monitor before stepping outside, having too much experience with drastically unexpected weather conditions to take any chances. Luckily, everything seems normal (for the TARDIS anyway), and she excitedly slips on a bikini under her clothes.

The Doctor is fretting about in the kitchen when she gets back from the quick change. “Make sure to put on sunscreen before you go swimming,” they call, but Anji’s two steps ahead of them, having grabbed the SPF 40 on her way out the door of her room. Fitz rolls his eyes from where he’s lounging on the couch in the console room, waiting for them.  
“I never burn, Doc,” he calls. “Hurry up! What are you making, a ten course meal?” The Doctor joins them in the console room with a large and heavy-looking picnic basket. “Oh, I’ve just packed a few things,” they say carelessly, which indicates to both of them that Fitz isn’t too far off the mark, and they’ll have a feast for lunch.

Leaving the TARDIS, the warm air enfolds her instantly, dense and uncomfortable at first, but as she adjusts, luxurious. Anji bothers Fitz into helping her set up lounge chairs and a portable umbrella, then plonks down her towel and a book as he strips to his shorts and races into the gentle surf. She pulls off her clothes more slowly, lazy in the amber syrupy heat, and takes time to admire their surroundings. Jastrii, a wealthy and hideously expensive resort planet in a few hundred thousand years, is at this point populated only by fauna, almost none of which has found its way to this island yet, tiny and remote in the vast expanse of sea. Even the bugs seem fewer than she’s used to. It’s breathtaking. 

The sky is…different, in some way that’s yet to make itself apparent to her, while the ocean is much more obviously alien, deep royal blue even in the shallow waters.   
They’ve set up their little camp on a red pebble beach, each tiny rock smooth and rounded from millennia of sea water erosion. The beach is quite like Earth, but just different enough to be off-putting. The lack of calling birds or other living noises is eerie, and only adds to the otherworldly effect.

Anji’s still contemplating this when she hears the gravel shift behind her a second before frigid water pours over her head. She shrieks and leaps to her feet, yelling “FITZ!” at the top of her lungs only to spin around and find the Doctor, shirtless and holding a bright yellow pail, grinning sheepishly at her. From the water, Fitz scowls at the accusation, but playfully. She rounds on the two of them and can only stare, speechless and soaking for a minute before punching the Doctor in the arm.

“You, you, _absolute toddler!_ "

“I’m sorry Anji,” they say, and sound genuinely apologetic, which means there’s about a fifty-fifty chance they actually are. 

“You just looked hot, and I thought I’d help,” they continue, and Anji takes a moment to be briefly amazed at how, from anyone else, that sentence would be a blatant come-on. From the Doctor, it’s simply an observation. 

She can’t bring herself to really be annoyed, however. The dense heat is nicely cut through by a breeze cooling the water on her skin and in her hair, and it’s honestly the most decadent she’s felt in probably months. _Years_ , murmurs an uncomfortable voice in the back of her head. She shoos away the thought. She’s genuinely happy, and startled to realize this. She fights and fails to smother a wide smile, and the Doctor gives her one in turn, huge and joyful, crinkling the corners of their eyes and deepening the laugh lines around their mouth.

She beckons them over and they gladly accept her big-armed hug. She leans in and mutters in their ear, “Well Doctor, in that case it would be unacceptably rude of me not to return the favour.” 

She gets an up-close view as a Shakespearean drama’s worth of expressions cross the Doctor’s face in an instant, before she shifts her weight and shoves forward, catapulting them both backward into the shallow waves. The Doctor breaks the surface spluttering, she, laughing. 

\---

Hours in the sun, spent swimming, sunbathing, and battling Fitz at a mutually-embarrassing attempt at one-on-one waterpolo have left her the good kind of exhausted. She’s lying on her stomach on a towel, limbs the combination of jelly-loose and heavy that only seems to happen at the beach. The sun is finally setting.   
Fitz had spent most of supper serenading them, actually pretty well, though he got three chords into Wonderwall before Anji had threatened to chuck his guitar into the sea. The Doctor had mediated this point of near-violence by mildly suggesting Closing Time, briefly uniting Fitz and Anji against them. 

But that was an hour ago. Now, the fire over which they’d roasted pork, boiled pudding, baked potatoes, fried spring sausage and toasted some well-squashed packaged marshmallows (from the Doctor’s coat pocket) has faded down to embers, intensely hot and near-useless to see by. Anji and Fitz are opposite each other with the fire pit between them. The Doctor had made a big fuss about wanting to meditate, but after a few minutes Fitz’d noticed snoring and gently tipped them over, headfirst into his lap. This hadn’t appeared to wake them. 

Fitz is playing with the Doctor’s hair, a subconscious self-soothing mechanism, and one that to Anji’s now-trained eye is both suggestive and not. She still refuses to even try to find out if they’re actually sleeping together, but it honestly seems beside the point. The two of them simply are, orbiting each other like binary stars. She’s seen a few of those up close by now, and knows that the stable ones have other loci to anchor them, smaller and farther away. She thinks this and regrets the metaphor.

Fitz is trying not to look at her. He’s not subtle. She idly wonders if that sunburn is going to be as painful as it looks. After maybe two minutes of watching him pretend he isn’t watching her, she gropes around for a pebble and lightly tosses it. It catches him smartly in the head, right on target. 

“Ow! What the hell?” 

“What?” she asks, not picking her head up off the towel. Sometimes she’ll be childish to match his perpetually arrested development. Sometimes she’ll lob stones just to piss him off. Theirs is an idiosyncratic relationship.

“No, _you_ what,” he retorts. She sticks her tongue out at him, not done being obnoxious just yet.

“Why’re you looking at me like I just kicked your cat?” Anji refuses to get up, even as she slurs half the words in that sentence mumbling them into the ground. 

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Fitz says, now looking anywhere but at her. She snorts. James Bond and Sam Spade and even Fitz Fortune are excellent poker players. Fitzgerald Kreiner can’t hide a damn thing when he’s being himself. He struggles with himself, then folds.

“One time, long way back, you said...you were basically a hostage,” he begins. An icy knot immediately clenches in her stomach. She has to sit up for this. It takes considerable effort.

“Ye-es,” she cautiously answers. 

“But,” he hesitates, and it gives him away. “You don’t, _still_ feel that way.” Fitz phrases the question like a statement, as though it will make the answer confirm it. 

She doesn’t want to leave and they all know it. She’s afraid she missed her chance and they all know that too, and probably think the same. She doesn’t want to leave this family in more danger than when she joined them, and she knows all of that already except the first part. The word _family_ , that now opens in her head with all its flurry of huge, branching meaning. It would be enough to make her dizzy, if she wasn’t too tired to move. Fitz is still waiting on an answer, and she has one.

“I don’t,” she sighs, and gives herself away. Across embers, it’s difficult to tell whether Fitz’s mouth twists in relief, or whether it’s just too dark to see anything other than shadows on his face. His shoulders slump in one quick motion though, a breath just barely not a sob. He’s terrible at bluffing. 

They aren’t playing poker. 

This isn’t one of their petty games of one upmanship; there’s nothing for her to win by not saying what she feels. Looking anywhere but in his eyes, she glances down and notices dimly that the Doctor’s eyes are slitted open. Fitz is nothing like Rezaul, Anji thinks, and misses her brother wrenchingly. Steeling herself, braced against some nameless disaster of her own invention, she looks back up and faces her brother. 

“I love you,” she says calmly, and then, after Fitz’s eyes widen in panic she probably could’ve predicted, _aurghes_ in irritation and corrects herself. “Not like _that_ , you lummox. Like, as a friend. A comrade. A, a,” she searches wildly. 

“A companion,” the Doctor murmurs, eyes now fully clamped shut again, for all the world still sleeping, as if they’d ever been. This is belied by tension in their shoulders, poised as if to spring away at the slightest hint of danger. 

“Not really the word I’m looking for,” she says. She goes on. “I’m not leaving you two. I love you. You’re-- “ the word chokes her, freezes on her tongue. “Good people,” she finishes lamely. 

“Arguable,” says Fitz, to fill the sudden silence. 

The awkwardness is crushing. Neither of them can think of a thing to say and she can’t pass this off as she and Fitz always do, with a play-fight and performative callousness. It wouldn’t be playful at all. The Doctor saves the universe yet again sitting bolt upright and jutting their chin like a setter toward the horizon. 

“Storm is coming. Big one. I can taste it in my toes.” Fitz and Anji share a long-familiar look as the Doctor clambers to their feet, shaking sand out of various bits of clothing. The sea is flat, becalmed.

“ _Come on come on come on_ ,” they chastise, “Time to pack up before we’re dragged in and drowned!”

The moment of tension dissipates. The three of them hunt up and down the beach for scattered sand shoes and salad forks, mindful to remove all traces of anachronisms like the good time tourists that they are. 

\---

Back on the TARDIS, she and Fitz say their goodnights to the Doctor and toddle off to their respective rooms. The alien who watches them and cares for them and only sometimes loses them sets a new destination’s coordinates into their magic box and then asks her very nicely to take them there. She almost certainly will not.

The bedrooms have decided to be across from each other in the same corridor tonight, and they pause in front of their doors, both profoundly willing the other to make the first move. Anji breaks first, turns, and gives Fitz the same awkward fistbump that was the only affectionate contact Rezaul allowed her for eight months when he was fourteen. They exchange tight smiles, and for a second Anji thinks that might be the end of it--before Fitz pulls her in for a sudden, terrifying hug. It’s bony, and too tight, and he’s got more than a foot on her. Her face is smushed into approximately his navel. She clings for half a second, her hands curling into fists at the small of his back--and then it’s over just as abruptly as it began. 

She doesn’t get a good look at his face as he pushes through his door, offering a glimpse of books and clothes strewn across floor and bed, guitars by contrast hanging neatly on the walls, sorted by type. The door clicks shut, and Anji turns back to her own room, clean modern lines, (aside from the roundels) made bed, swimming pool-sized spa. A few pictures of fabulous places. One polaroid of Dave in a frame. 

She gave both of them, her companions, too much. Exposed herself, let herself be vulnerable. It hurts. Her skin crawls with unnamed, irrational dread of someone in this universe of monsters and nightmares and beauty using Fitz and the Doctor, and _I love you_ , against her. Her heart can break more than once. As it turns out, her capacity to survive that particular wound may well be infinite. But it never hurts any less when it happens. She falls back on her bed, noticing for the first time in a while that she’s still wearing a sandy bikini under her sundress, and how much it itches. She counts to ten, inhaling slowly as she does, and lets it go. 

She has loved and lost before. Even without the TARDIS, in a universe filled to the brim with ordinary tragedies, she is guaranteed to lose more people she loves. Every one of them, eventually. She might as well accept it, and not try to hide the obvious fact that she cares.

But she keeps that word, _family_ , to herself, guarding it close with all the other precious things.


End file.
